In the Think Tank for Obama

POLITICS | Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 2:08:43 pm PST

The Wall Street Journal has a report on the think tank from which Barack Obama seems to be drawing his top advisers.

WASHINGTON — The Center for a New American Security, a small think tank here with generally middle-of-the-road policy views, is rapidly emerging as a top farm team for the incoming Obama administration. …

The think tank’s central role in the transition effort suggests that its positions — which include rejecting a fixed timeline for a withdrawal from Iraq — will get a warm reception within the new administration.

Michele Flournoy, who co-founded the center with Kurt Campbell, a former Clinton National Security Council and Pentagon official, now serves as its president. She is one of two top members of Mr. Obama’s defense transition team and is likely to be offered a high-ranking position at the Pentagon. Some Obama advisers say she could eventually be tapped as the nation’s first female defense secretary.

Wendy Sherman, co-head of the Obama State Department transition team, also serves on the center’s board of advisers and is expected to land a high-ranking post. Richard Danzig, a front-runner for defense secretary, is on the think tank’s board of directors. Susan Rice and James Steinberg, both of whom are on Mr. Obama’s short list for national security adviser, serve on its board of advisers.

Impeach Nixon!

US NEWS | Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 12:55:52 pm PST

The left-wing veterans’ group called Vets for Peace has been occupying the National Archives in Washington DC. What, you didn’t hear that? Well, they’re occupying a scaffoldoutside the National Archives anyway. Well, sort of milling around on one level of a scaffold, to be precise. Nobody seems too anxious to evict them. Jonn Lilyea has pictures:Veterans for Peace at the Archives.

Features this classic photo of one of their support vehicles. (He took down the pic from being listed on this site)

Murdoch on the Pajamas Factor

MEDIA | Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 9:23:13 am PST

Rupert Murdoch says the mainstream media has become contemptuous of its audience:Murdoch to media: You dug yourself a huge hole.

To make his point, Murdoch criticized the media reaction after bloggers debunked a “60 Minutes” report by former CBS anchor, Dan Rather, that President Bush had evaded service during his days in the National Guard.

“Far from celebrating this citizen journalism, the establishment media reacted defensively. During an appearance on Fox News, a CBS executive attacked the bloggers in a statement that will go down in the annals of arrogance. ‘60 Minutes,’ he said, was a professional organization with ‘multiple layers of checks and balances.’ By contrast, he dismissed the blogger as ‘a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing.’ But eventually it was the guys sitting in their pajamas who forced Mr. Rather and his producer to resign.

“Mr. Rather and his defenders are not alone,” he continued. “A recent American study reported that many editors and reporters simply do not trust their readers to make good decisions. Let’s be clear about what this means. This is a polite way of saying that these editors and reporters think their readers are too stupid to think for themselves.”

The media are still defensive about this incident. Not a single major news source has unequivocally admitted that those Rathergate documents were obvious, proven fakes; when they refer to the incident, it’s always phrased like this: “Right-wing bloggers alleged that the memos were forged,” or “Conservative pundits cast doubt on the authenticity of the documents.”

For reference:
Bush Guard Documents: Forged

UPDATE at 11/17/08 10:20:21 am:

Sure enough, along comes the New York Times to prove my point: Rather’s Lawsuit Shows Role of G.O.P. in Inquiry at CBS.

Mr. Rather attracted the ire of Republican bloggers and talk radio in particular after the segment, which was broadcast on a weekday edition of “60 Minutes” in September 2004. It purported to have unearthed evidence about favorable treatment extended to President Bush during his Vietnam-era service in the Texas Air National Guard.

The network eventually responded to its critics by saying it could no longer vouch for the authenticity of the documents on which the report had been based. The network also commissioned an investigation led by Dick Thornburgh, a prominent Republican and former United States attorney general, and Louis D. Boccardi, a former chief executive of The Associated Press, not so much to verify the documents, but to determine how the segment got on the air.

“Not so much to verify the documents!” Because, hey! Who really cares whether a major news organization was part of an attempt to skew a presidential election with fraudulent documents? Let’s focus on the important stuff, like “the ire of Republican bloggers.”

(Hat tip: Soccer Dad.)

Who’s the Anti-Intellectual?

OPINION | Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 8:40:44 am PST

Timothy Sandefur has an interesting post on the anti-intellectualism of the left.

Liberals have lately been making much of the purported anti-intellectualism of conservatives in the late election. No doubt they’re right. But I must say I find it laughable that this charge would come from liberals of all people. The left in this country has had a long and dismal history of embracing a wide variety of anti-intellectual credos.

Start with the most obvious: the left has long been the welcoming home of fashionable postmodern nonsense like deconstructivism and moral and cultural relativism. Under these doctrines there are supposed to be different kinds of “logics” (male logic, female logic, &.) and none is more valid than the other. All of them are simply clever masks for a brutal competition for wealth and power. This is a profoundly anti-intellectual strain of pseudo-thought which avoids the need to take any arguments seriously, because such ideas simply be accused of corruption. When Sandra Harding called Newton’s Principia a “rape manual,” she did so from the left, not from the right. And the cultural relativists who demand that we treat the dismal productions of barbaric cultures as the intellectual equivalents of Shakespeare and Homer—and tars as “racist” anyone who suggests that some cultures and their mores are better than others—are fundamentally, even proudly anti-intellectual.

These ideologies masquerade, unconvincingly, as intellectual movements, but they are simply attempts to ignore ideas, or to shoot them down with reactionary appeals to political dogmas. They treat the world of thought with the same contempt as a street thug, except that they phrase his appeal to violence in more clever terminology. In the end it is the same: power over thought, force over reason. Goebbels said that when he heard the word culture, he reached for his gun, but many of the so-called “radical” intellectuals of today avoid the challenge of thought altogether by interpreting it in terms of base politics—and not even a very sophisticated politics, but a politics centered entirely around the tribal: around racial and gender conflicts over land and money.

“Radical chic” is a leftist phenomenon, not a conservative one. It was, and is, liberals who accord street thugs and petty vandals the respectability of academic honors. The terrorist Bill Ayers? Or the terrorist Angela Davis, winner of the Lenin Peace Prize of the U.S.S.R.? She’s presidential chair at U.C. Santa Cruz. It was liberals who not only gave the anti-intellectual thug Norman Mailer pop icon status, but handed him the mantle of a respectable intellectual. The Jack Abbott case was a curiosity to them, and a source of gossip. When he stabbed his wife with a penknife at a dinner party, almost killing her in 1960, was that the end of his run as a leftist intellectual? Hardly. The left respects its anti-intellectual thugs.